As systems administrators, we abhor spam. It bogs down servers, floods our personal mailboxes, and wastes our user’s time. As web content providers, we also are extremely annoyed that email contact information is blatently reaped and abused. The Internet can be so much more than a cesspool of spam. On the other hand, the Internet […]

As you may or may not know, Washington State has a spam law that forbids deceptive email practices. For more info on this law see this area of the Attorney General of Washington’s website. Well, a landmark case regarding this law has just been decided. We put a copy of the release up on NetAdminTools […]

One good trick to use when testing your email server is to use telnet. To send email, you can just telnet into the destination email server directly: u-1@srv-1 u-1 $ telnet yourmailserver.com 25 Trying 21.40.23.46… Connected to yourmailserver.com. Escape character is ‘^]’. 220 mx.yourmailserver.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.12.9/8.12.9; Thu, 12 Jun 2003 10:06:19 -0700 helo frommail.com […]

Due to DDoS attacks on Osirusoft, Osirusoft decided to reject all. So, if you are using Osirusoft to block spam, stop! Well, hats off to the valiant efforts of Osirusoft. Can’t really blame them for their reaction to this world of shit. The beautiful thing is that sysadmins and others in our community will find […]

It is truly amazing how many resources are taken up on a server by other rogue boxes searching for an open relay, or simply sending dictionary attempts at finding local users. Watch-maillog is a perl script that uses IPtables to block mail servers that abuse your server. Watch-maillog helps with this by blocking servers that […]

We often need to mail brief messages from servers to send config files, or quick messages to other sysadmins. Pine works well for this, and the installation is mostly a single binary. We usually are logged in on some account that isn’t the email address we wish replies to come to. It turns out that […]

If you simply want to make a mailbox receive mail for another address, just add the full address to /etc/postfix/virtual: [root@srv-2 postfix]# cat virtual usr-1@networking.com usr usr-1@networking2.com usr usr-2@maildomain.com anotherusr If we simply add this line to the bottom: usr-3@maildomain.com anotherusr Mail that was was delivered previously via usr-2@maildomain.com will be delivered in the same […]

Spiderkiller is a C program that will generate unique pages with random email addresses that will confuse harvesting bots. Compile the app: srv-5:~ usr4$ gcc spiderkiller.c -o spiderkiller spiderkiller.c: In function ‘main’: spiderkiller.c:299: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function ‘strlen’ The options are simple: srv-5:~ usr4$ ./spiderkiller -help Usage: spiderkiller [-help] [-n ] [-k […]

One of the servers we work on is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL 3). We needed some features in the later versions of Postfix, rather than the backported version for RHEL 3. There are some RPMs available here: http://postfix.wl0.org/ftp/official/2.2/RPMS-rhel3-i386 The latest version as of the date of this article is 2.2.5-3. If you […]

In this article, we upgraded Postfix to 2.2.5 via RPMs; however, if a later version is needed, and you are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 3 (RHEL 3), an RPM needs to be created from source. There is a source RPM for 2.2.6 available here: http://postfix.wl0.org/ftp/official/2.2/SRPMS/ To use the RPM, install it: [root@s root]# […]

First off, Pine rocks when it comes to reading mail quickly, particularly on a server where a GUI is not available. Second of all, it often doesn’t come with GNU/Linux distributions anymore. I suppose that part of the problem is that pine includes a version of IMAP that can cause problems if it coexists with […]

The opportunists who send unsolicited bulk email (UBE) use tools that do not follow standards. This can work to an advantage in that improper configuration can allow quite a bit of filtering to be done on inbound email. For instance, the following entries in main.cf for postfix will dramatically cut down on email from misconfigured […]

There is an excellent discussion of the Blue Security DDOS attack here, including a copy of discussion from those behind the DDOS here. There is more information on Blue Frog and related issues on Wikipedia here. If you somehow missed this, it is probably in your best interest to be aware of what is going […]

If you have bad messages in your Postfix mail queue, you can list them with the postqueue command: [root@svr-1 mail]# postqueue -p -Queue ID- –Size– —-Arrival Time—- -Sender/Recipient——- 4C63F2300BA 876 Mon Jun 5 09:31:54 user@somedomainsomewhere.com (connect to example.com[192.0.34.166]: Connection timed out) differentuser@example.com — 1 Kbytes in 1 Request. You will need the Queue Id to […]

Postfix has the ability to reject mail based on regular expression matching in the header of the incoming mail message. To enable this, add these lines to main.cf: header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/header_checks header_checks = pcre:/etc/postfix/header_checks We stuck these after the alias line. Add the header content matches and actions to header_checks (usually in /etc/postfix) and restart […]

When migrating from an internal email system to Google Apps, it’s nice to have the option of running a pilot program including a few of your users to try it out, and then to move the rest of the users over when problems with the transition have been identified and addressed. This is pretty easy […]